Since the single bird didn't work, Alex stood next to the damaged spot that was slowly healing and waited for other birds to co. Soon, he could hear a loud caw in the sky as two birds moved down from the smog.
Imdiately, they made their way down toward him. As they did, Alex looked at their trajectory and narrowed his eyes as a frown ford on his face. "They're targeting my head and my leg," he told himself, realizing the points of impact would be two different locations.
He had to change that. With a thought, space distorted around him, and the space that was around his head and his leg beca twisted until they were close to each other.
He twisted the space around even more, pushing it closer toward the damaged spot. At the very last mont, when the birds nearly struck him, Alex used the Dao of Spatial Contraction to move out of the way once again. In the absence of teleportation, this was the fastest thod he had of getting out of the attack line.
As soon as he arrived elsewhere, he heard two distinct but nearly simultaneous booms that resounded throughout the forest. The two birds struck close enough to the sa spot as the first bird, the energy from them glowing brightly against the yellow barrier on the inside.
"Tsk!"
Alex couldn't help but show an expression of annoyance when he realized that he had failed this ti as well. He had hoped two would do the task, but it seed he had been optimistic.
"Fine, let more co."
He went right back to the damaged spot and waited for more birds to co. While he waited, he examined the spot and realized that the energy from the birds was dissipating away. If the birds had struck
the ground, the location would've been a pool of lava at the mont, but the barrier had so weird property to it that made the damage from the previous birds slowly heal.
Alex couldn't help but frown, understanding that he might have to deliver an intense amount of energy in a very short ti. Thankfully, more birds would co soon, so he would have that opportunity.
He had hope.
Three birds ca, which annoyed Alex a little. He had hoped there would be four birds this ti, doubling from the previous tis as they had back in the lava when he had tried to sneak into the Talon instead of taking the trials.
"This might take much longer," he told Shumi and Whisker, before sighing as he got back into the task at hand.
Another three explosions covered the land, each one with a fraction of a second in between them. The three spots where the birds hit the barrier lay visible for everyone to see. While Alex had tried his very best to twist the space so that all the beasts would hit the sa location, because he moved away, the space was halfway into healing itself, and thus the actual location that the birds landed on wasn't the exact spot at all.
Alex took that information into account for the next ti the birds would co. Five birds ca out this ti around, causing Alex to be taken aback.
"Not four?" he thought. Was it not following any logic?
Now that he thought about it, sothing similar had happened with Whisker as well. The birds that had co when it was underground didn't have a logical progression to them either. It had gone from one to two to two to four and more. He had considered that to be the case because Whisker had gone underground, but he now wondered if that was not the case.
"The numbers are illogical," Alex thought, wondering if it ant what
he thought it ant. "Soone is controlling them, right?"
It could only be one being as far as he knew. It was the Master of the Trial.
In the absence of logic, he had to find intelligence, and that was the only thing he knew of on the island that was intelligent.
"Is it watching us?" Alex thought. He had previously considered the birds to be so sort of spirit created by so formations to co out occasionally to explain things, like sothing set up with pre-planned actions. But that might not have been the case now that he thought about it.
"It saw I could easily handle three, so it sent five," Alex thought. "Is that it?"
He couldn't help but smirk. If the Master of the Trial thought he would lose just because it sent two more birds, then it was sorely mistaken about his capabilities.
Alex used his spatial daos again and dodged at the last second. This ti, he forced himself to stay there for as long as he could so that the space would revert to how it was and thus allow the birds to strike the sa location.
Alex heard a resounding boom, one where he had a hard ti distinguishing the gap between the birds' attacks. He couldn't help but smile as he realized that he was quite good at it.
He went back to the mountainside and looked at the result of his actions. He was slightly disappointed to see that the barrier still stood just as well as it had, but at least he had now gotten the hang of things. If there were more birds, he could surely do sothing with it.
He patiently waited for a long ti before the next set of birds appeared in the sky once again. Alex smiled, but it lasted for just a second when he realized that there were way more this ti.
"Eight? Really?"
That was a bigger jump than last ti. An additional three birds would have a lot more energy than just five. In a way, he was happy about it.
He smiled widely as he prepared for the birds to co strike him down. But at the last mont, he noticed sothing different from the previous four tis that made his smile disappear.
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